In his remarkable debut collection, Jack Warren explores the quiet intimacy between labourers and their landscapes. From stonemasons to gardeners, bar staff to construction workers, The Winter's Nail is filled with 'men for whom work was the word'.
Warren's England is not an idealised arcadia - often sodden, littered and noisy - yet still a place to find sufficient wonder ('a lattice-work of frost on the barbed wire fence') to engender a 'tenderness that lifts the heart'. Warren sanctifies physical labour and examines themes of ecology, class, and collective human memory in tender and deft verse. With unsentimental clarity, Warren finds solace and renewal in the small beauties of the natural world in this meditation on modern England.
Political, darkly humorous, and threaded with hope, The Winter's Nail is filled with poems for and of our times and announces Jack Warren as an impressive new lyrical voice.